Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Hypocritical Use of Witness
Evidence

An area which manifests
itself due to the lack of a proper methodology (as well perhaps intellectual
honesty) from MGK is their almost comedic reliance upon witness statements that
they simultaneously seek to discredit through their work. This dependence
exposes just how weak the Revisionist evidence of delousing/transit camps
really is, with deniers having to utilize sources which they deride and pour
scorn on throughout their writings. Their desperation is aptly established by
Mattogno in Treblinka: “If one assumes that Treblinka was a transit
camp, then one can also interpret the description of the alleged extermination
facilities by the witnesses.”[125] MGK
are only able to conduct this bizarre interpretation of statements by inverting
the meaning of the witness, such as their understanding of the camouflage
measures that witnesses detail for the gas chambers as being literal, but
misconstrued or misreported by the witnesses.[126] They
even do this for persons whom they label as “discredited.”[127] They
also highlight testimonies as being given under oath when it suits their
hypothesis of resettlement (even when it is discredited through documentary
evidence), but mock other statements given under oath describing exterminations
as having no validity.[128]

An example of how desperate Revisionist researchers are
in support of evidence for their resettlement thesis, Mattogno is even forced
to use the mission of Kurt Gerstein, perhaps the witness most discussed and
criticized by deniers for his description of the Reinhard exterminations. In Treblinka,
Gerstein is referred to in support of delousing at the three camps, although
Mattogno does so without referencing his testimony (which also does not even
hint at an alleged delousing function of the camps).[129]
Indeed, Mattogno can only cite very weak circumstantial evidence (Gerstein was
an expert in disinfection), which he considers sufficient enough to conclude
that Gerstein’s August 1942 mission served a hygienic purpose; why, if Gerstein
went for hygienic purposes, would he not be sent to the supposed delousing
camps early in their operation (he arrived in Belzec five months after the
start of operations) is not explained. Mattogno also believes such a trip would
explain Rajzman’s indirect hearsay (and incorrect) statement about the use of
Zyklon-B at Treblinka, despite the fact that Rajzman was criticized in Treblinka
for exhibiting “hopeless confusion,” and testifying to things that were “pure
fantasy.”[130]

Another prime example of the distorted interpretation of
MGK can be seen in their treatment of the testimony by Judith Eliazer.[131]
Eliazer’s testimony is quoted as follows:

On 10 March 1942 we went directly from Westerbork
to Sobibor, where we arrived on 13 or 15 March. There we were selected. Thirty
girls and 44 men were taken out. The remainder were gassed and burned. (We have
seen that the others were moved away in tilting trolleys. They may have been
dumped into pits.) Sobibor was not a camp. It was a transit camp.
(Mattogno’s emphasis)[132]

For Mattogno, since
Eliazer “saw neither gas chambers nor cremations,” and was sent to other
concentration camps after her selection at Sobibor, her experience can only be
understood if Sobibor served as a transit camp.[133] Such a
conclusion is obviously a non sequitur, as Eliazer did not experience the fate
of other deportees to the camp; Eliazer was not even subjected to hygienic
measures in the camp (which Sobibor allegedly had, according to MGK) prior to
being sent on to other concentration camps.[134] MGK
also hand wave Eliazer’s statement on the fate of those Jews not selected out
of the transport (“the remainder were gassed and burned”), without providing
any additional evidence to show another fate. The distortion of Eliazer’s
testimony by MGK does not move their notion of a transit camp forward at
all.

In Sobibór, there are more such examples of
Mattogno’s inverted interpretation of witness statements, in more certain
terms:

It is a fact that the first descriptions of
the alleged extermination facilities given by the witnesses resemble more
closely actual sanitary installations (showers and disinfestations) than
homicidal gas chambers.[135]

In Treblinka,
Mattogno noted that if one assumed the reality of a transit camp (a
matter of belief), then witness statements could be also be seen in a
similar light.[136]
In Sobibór, however, this connection becomes a certainty (“it is a
fact”). This “fact” can only be accepted by a backward treatment of testimony,
in which any details regarding the Nazi technique to deceive their victims are
taken as real (without evidence) and the rest of the statements which refer to
exterminations are ignored or discarded.

One victim of such a dishonest interpretation is
Ukrainian Wachmann Mikhail Razgonaiev, who is criticized several times
in Sobibór[137]for
his testimony regarding exterminations at Sobibor, but is quoted for his
statement that “everyone would be given a piece of soap.”[138] Of
course, what Mattogno leaves out is Razgonaiev’s clear connection of such a
measure to part of a Nazi effort to lessen any chance of resistance by a
transport:

All this was done in order to conceal the
true objectives for which the people had been brought to the camp…It has to be
added that Germans also thought about other details that also served as
camouflage for the true reason for which the people were brought to the Sobibor
camp. Thus, for example, in the “dressing room” there were train time-tables,
all sorts of posters appealing to people to maintain order, etc. When the
people were invited to the “bath-house,” each one was given a piece of soap.[139]
The lie would end only when the people went into the gas chambers, where they
would discover that there was no bath-house and that they had been taken there
to be destroyed.[140]

Thus, in the sentence
immediately following the phrase quoted by Mattogno, Razgonaiev noted the
ultimate fate of the deportees. Elsewhere in his testimony, Razgonaiev also
specifically connected the soap to an effort by the camp administrators to
“ensure security in performance of the extermination.”[141] One
can clearly see how deluded MGK are if they think Razgonaiev’s testimony (given
in 1948) more closely describes sanitary installations than a death camp.

Another witness that Mattogno cites in support of his
bizarre interpretation is the indirect witness Alexander Pechersky, who MGK
conflate between a direct and indirect witness.[142]
Pechersky makes an odd source of evidence for Revisionists, as he is among one
of the most targeted survivors for supposedly alleging a “fanciful” method of
murder.[143]
Mattogno attributes a description of the gas chambers with the appearance of a
bath house, with faucets and wash basins, to Pechersky. Instead, as pointed out
earlier, Pechersky is only quoting an “old time inmate,” who learned his
information from other discussions with camp inmates. Similar such hearsay statements about the
deceptive “bath” qualities of the gas chamber are also quoted by Mattogno along
with Pechersky, such as Leon Feldhendler,[144] who
never worked in the extermination area.

No doubt in response to this section, MGK would cite a
1995 article by researcher Jean-Claude Pressac, known for his technical work
regarding the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[145] In
Pressac’s article, which has been quoted and cited in all of MGK’s major
Reinhard works,[146]
he posits that Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka originally served as delousing
and transit installations until mid-1942, when they converted to extermination
centres. To support his thesis, Pressac uses the testimony of Stanislaw Kozak
(which he writes as ‘Kosak’) regarding the construction of a bath house and the
placement of ovens inside the presumed gas chambers, as well as a November 1942
report from the Polish underground detailing the use of steam to kill Jews at
the Treblinka camp.[147] In
unconventionally reading these sources, Pressac comes to his conclusion that
the camps originally served as delousing centres. The article, as well as his
baseless estimates of the numbers killed in the Reinhard camps in a subsequent
interview,[148]
shows that Pressac was not as reliable on topics outside of his work on Auschwitz-Birkenau
(of which, conversely, Mattogno is a staunch critic). Thus, Pressac’s baseless
and faulty take on the Aktion Reinhard camps, in which he inverts witness
statements and reports to fit a delousing operation, cannot help the
credibility of MGK’s approach, which extends Pressac’s conjecture to,
essentially, all witnesses.

Perhaps the most blatantly hypocritical use of witness
testimony by MGK concerns Stanislaw Kozak. In support of their
transit/delousing camp thesis, MGK have often relied upon the statements from
Kozak, a Polish labourer who took part in the construction of the gas chambers
at Belzec.[149]
In his description of the gas chamber installation, Kozak later recounted:

In each of the three rooms inside the
barracks I mentioned, we installed furnaces weighing some 250 kg each.
Presumably the elbow-pipes were later connected to these furnaces. They were
110 cm high, 55 cm wide and 55 cm long. Out of curiosity we looked through the
door of one of these furnaces to catch a glimpse inside. I saw a grid and the
furnace interior had been tiled-by the looks of it with fireproof tiles. I could
see no other openings. The door was oval shaped with a vertical diameter of 25
cm, and about 50 cm above floor level.[150]

Kozak’s testimony on these
ovens counts as one of the most important forms of evidence that MGK can offer
in an alternative explanation of the Aktion Reinhard camps. This point is borne
out by MGK’s repeated references and quotations of the statement.[151] In Bełżec,
Mattogno declares (cueing off Jean-Claude Pressac[152]) that
the presence of the ovens can be explained as Heißluftentwesungsöfen,
hot air disinfestations ovens, with no other details offered.[153] Kues
tries to relate Kozak’s description of ovens to a proposal for the Majdanek
camp (never implemented or accepted) in which coke-fuelled calorifers fed
heated air into delousing chambers for clothes.[154] The
two descriptions bear no resemblance to one another; for instance, Kozak has
the ovens inside the gas chambers, while the Majdanek proposal has the heaters
outside the chambers but forcefully feeding hot air into the room.[155]

It is clear that MGK’s reliance upon Kozak was the result
of a desperate search, not well thought out or researched, for evidence of an
alternative to homicidal gassings. In a note highlighting areas where Revisionism
has been silent or ill-researched, Kues notes that Kozak’s description of ovens
at Belzec requires more study.[156]
According to the article, work still needed to be done to see if “the ovens
described by Kozak (can) be matched against documented Heißluftentwesungsöfen.”
Kues lists several sources to find such an answer, but it is apparent that MGK
failed to address this research gap prior to the publication of Sobibór. Indeed,
as seen with the plan for Majdanek discussed by Mattogno, and as also evident
by the hot air disinfectors at Auschwitz-Birkenau[157], Kozak’s
description bears no relation to other Heißluftentwesungsöfen of the
period.

Still, MGK feel comfortable asserting that Kozak’s
description of ovens inside the gas chambers point to “actual sanitary
installations (showers and disinfestations)” rather than homicidal gas
chambers.[158]
In an earlier article, Kues notes that these features served as “harmless
components of a facility for hot air disinfestations.”[159] This
hypothesis is extremely weak, for not only does it lack evidence, but at the
time that the Aktion Reinhard camps were built and established, camp clothing
delousing facilities overwhelmingly employed HCN (Hydrogen Cyanide, poison
found in Zyklon-B); hot-air and steam facilities were extremely limited at this
time, and were even shunned by the SS hierarchy. According to a March 11, 1942
order from the SS Budget and Construction Office (WVHA), overriding an earlier
ban on the use of HCN for delousing measures, actions were to be taken to
ensure the “conversion of all delousing facilities to operate with HCN,” and
specifically that “delousing by means of hot air or hot steam is only
permissible insofar as they involve temporary installations, in which the
necessary safety for the handling of HCN is not assured.”[160]
Expansions of the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps in late 1941-1942 serve as
examples to show the emphasis of HCN delousing facilities during these years.
Hot-air disinfestation chambers would also still require facilities for the
Jewish deportees to shower and gather their clothes, a feature for which MGK
have offered no evidence. Also, it remains to be explained why hot air
disinfection rooms would be located well into the camp, but arrivals had to
undress immediately upon arrival in the reception area.

MGK’s treatment of Kozak exposes a tremendous double
standard in their approach to the historic evidence. Kozak’s statement on the
presence of ovens at Belzec is a feature not corroborated by any other witness
who took part in the construction of the Reinhard gas chambers, including those
at Belzec. It also does not fit with the wider array of evidence for the
Reinhard camps, which has been showcased in this critique. Yet MGK prefer to
cling onto such anomalies, and disregard or dismiss other features which have
been corroborated by multiple sources and witnesses, such as homicidal
gassings.[161]
It is also hypocritical for MGK to rely upon a witness who they criticize
elsewhere in their work, making no explanation for the contradictory
treatment.

Finally, no section on MGK’s hypocritical use of witnesses
would be complete without a discussion of Herman Kruk, the Jewish Bundist and
library director imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto until his deportation and
subsequent death in an Estonian labor camp. In recent years the members of MGK
have prominently cited Kruk’s diary as evidence for resettlement, providing him
a separate subsection in Sobibór[162]and selecting him as the first “witness” discussed in their extended
attempts to prove resettlement.[163] As
discussed earlier in this critique, Kruk, who was through his cultural
activities well connected within the ghetto, on terms with Jewish Ghetto police
leader Jacob Gens and other prominent persons, was an (admitted) indirect
witness in regards to events outside the Vilnius ghetto.[164]
The revisionists’ attempt to proclaim the diary as dealing “a devastating blow
to the official version” of the Holocaust then seems extremely misplaced[165],
and is similar to their continued conflation of direct and indirect witnesses
as discussed in a previous section. For instance, Graf and Kues have both cited
Kruk’s June 1943 diary entry as evidence for the continued presence of 1,500
German and Czech Jews in the Minsk ghetto. Their claim is based upon the word
of two delegates from Vilnius who had returned from Minsk after an inspection
tour to the city permitted by the authorities to encourage voluntary movement
of skilled workers from Vilnius to Minsk)[166].
Graf and Kues ignore the fact that Kruk himself stated that the two individuals
“were not allowed into the ghetto” and “first of all were informed that they
were not permitted to talk to anyone.”[167]
Such hearsay information hardly “confirms” that the German and Czech Jews were
present in the Minsk ghetto, and it misses the obvious point that thousands
more German Jews had been transported to Minsk in late 1941 and early 1942.
What was their fate if they were not still present in Minsk by mid-1943?

Indeed, MGK’s seemingly favoured line from Kruk’s dairy
is his April 16, 1943, entry where he mentioned in a single, short sentence a
“rumor” that 19,000 Dutch Jews were in Vievis, a labor camp. This sentence
followed Kruk’s report of two trains, each with 25 cars filled with “objects,
apparently from the Dutch Jews,” halted in Vilnius.[168]
The unattributed rumor of Dutch Jews in Vievis is regarded as “strong evidence”
by Graf and Kues that Dutch Jews transited through Sobibor to the Baltics; the
reason for this contention is that the duo cannot conceive of any reason for
Kruk otherwise to have mentioned such a story. Throughout the rest of April
1943, Kruk would return to the issue of the Dutch Jews, writing on April 30
about the deportation of a presumed 130,000 Jews from the Netherlands and
relating his discovery of a Jewish star written in Dutch, as well as the
arrival of Dutch furniture (for purposes of repair) into the Vilnius ghetto.
Kruk dated the deportation of the Dutch Jews to early 1943 based on the dates
on documents found in their furniture by Jewish workers in Vilnius. Upon the
arrival of the beautiful furniture, and as workers scavenged through the
objects and personal papers of their former owners, Kruk concluded on April 30
that “the Jews did not know they were going to be exterminated.”[169]

Graf and Kues both point out that Kruk does not offer an
explanation for why he became convinced that the Dutch Jews were killed.[170]
Such an argument fails to properly understand Kruk’s experiences and how he was
interpreting a variety of ominous events of which he had become aware. Kruk
learned of the numerous shootings of Soviet Jews both from his own experiences
and conversations he had with other Jews (including first hand witnesses and
members of the Judenrat), and of the wider extermination measures across the
continent from access he had to a clandestine radio. Such is why he was able to
write of a killing site at Malkinia (close proximity to Treblinka, which is
what he was obviously referring to) several times in his diary, including an
entry on April 19.[171]During April 1943 Kruk also recorded the news that reached Vilnius ghetto
by radio of the liquidation of Warsaw’s ghetto, including the Jews’ resistance
there[172]; the
disappearance of the larger part of Poland’s Jewish population and the
shootings of foreign Jews near Minsk and at the Seventh Fort in Kovno.[173]
Knowledgeable about the exterminations at Ponar, having interviewed survivors
of the 1941 shootings, Kruk concluded on April 26 that “Lithuania alone lost 85
percent of its Jews!”[174]; as
importantly, Kruk was well informed about Gens’s Oszmiana action (in which the
Vilnius Jewish police in October 1942, on Gestapo direction, had murdered
several hundred Jews in the nearby community) and the “Kovno” action (in which
nearly 4,000 Jews from Oszmiana, Swieciany, Ostrowiec, and a number of other
towns had been slaughtered at Ponar in April 1943). All this led Kruk to
declare in mid-April, in the context of the extermination of Warsaw’s Jews “in
Malkinia, near Lwow or near Zamosc,” that “The Vilna ghetto has lost all
illusions.”[175]
Through these experiences and his interpretation of the events as best he knew,
it did not take much of a leap to conclude that that the articles of furniture
were the loot of murdered Jews. Indeed, Kruk related in a subsequent sentence
that the Dutch Jews were slaughtered “just like the Oszmiana and Swieciany Jews.”[176]This point was deliberately and dishonestly omitted by Graf in his
quotation of Kruk in Sobibór[177],
but was included by Kues in his own article.[178]

Kues goes on to make the argument that if the furniture
was from Dutch Jews murdered at Sobibor, then it contradicts
the “mainstream historiography” on the camp, which has goods plundered from the
victims at the camps sent back to Germany. This represents the fallacy of the
excluded middle, as the furniture delivered to the Vilnius ghetto for repairs
can easily be understood as belonging to the Dutch Jews murdered at Sobibor if
Kues would have taken his research more seriously. Once Jews were deported from
occupied Europe, their remaining property left behind in apartments was
confiscated by Nazi authorities. Einsatzstab Rosenberg was in charge of such a
mission, and as Raul Hilberg relates, the Minister of the Eastern Territories
“laid claim to Jewish furniture in order to equip his offices in Russia and
sold the surplus to the Gauleitungen for bombed-out people at home.”[179]

We
also wish to point out to the readers, as well as to MGK themselves, that
nowhere in their collective works have MGK or any other writer ever made the
absurd claim that Jews deported to the Reinhard camps and ”resettled” to the
East were able to bring trainloads of expensive furniture. Further, we should
recall that Kruk mentioned only a rumour of 19,000 Dutch Jews taken to Vievis,
with no further mention of these Jews or never any contact with any Dutch Jews
at the camp. Vievis itself was a small labor camp located between Vilnius and
Kaunus, whose inmates worked on highway construction and who numbered about 700
in 1942. The camp was familiar to residents of Vilnius’s ghetto, as Jews passed
back and forth between the ghetto and this camp.[180]
In fact, according to historian Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene, in 1943 the camp
was under the jurisdiction of the German civil administration in Vilnius:
“Selections at the camp continued, and groups of Jews were brought to replace
others. Those who were ill were most often transferred to the Vilnius or Kaunas
ghettos. ... In September, a big group of Jews arrived at the Vievis camp.
Selections of those fit to work began immediately. Dzena selected able-bodied
Jews, and those who had gold, to remain in the camp. The greater majority,
including the elderly people and children, were transported to Paneriai
[Ponar]. ... The Vievis labour camp was liquidated in December 1943. All its
workers were murdered in Paneriai."[181]
In short, whatever Jews were in Vievis—and there is no evidence for Dutch Jews
being among them—were killed, if they survived the harsh regime, much as the
vast majority of Vilnius’s Jews were killed at Ponar.

While Kruk’s diary doesn’t prove
extermination of Jews at the Reinhard camps, it certainly is far from as supportive
of resettlement as MGK would like to it to be and spin it to be: the reality it
does show is the harsh and brutal conditions of ghetto life and camp
incarceration in the occupied Soviet territories.

[126] Ibid., p.292. Mattogno cites but does not explain witness
references to “baths.”

[127] MGK, Sobibór, pp.38, 54-55. Declaring Freiberg “discredited
as a witness” does not preclude them from relying on his 1945 testimony
regarding a speech to the new Sobibor arrivals.

[128] M&G, Treblinka, p.281, Mattogno highlights the fact that
Stroop’s February 1946 testimony, stating that 50-60,000 Jews from the Warsaw
ghetto were sent to Lublin (as opposed to Treblinka) was “made under oath.” In
MGK, Sobibór, pp. 177 and 188, Graf ridicules several statements made
under oath regarding exterminations.

[129] Ibid., p.294. To use Gerstein’s trip, Mattogno would have to
rely on his postwar statements.

[130] See the previous section on Rajzman’s hearsay statements. For
Mattogno’s remarks on Rajzman, see M&G, Treblinka, p.160.

[134] Note she was sent to other concentration camps and not any alleged
resettlement site “in the East.” We would also ask why Eliazer would be
selected out of the transport before such hygienic measures? Instead, it is
more likely that she was selected out from the victims destined to the gas
chambers.

[139] It is possible that Razgoniaev merely assumed that soap was given
out. Tanhum Grinberg testified, “During the undressing SS-man Untersturmfuehrer
Suchomel was hurrying people, saying that "in the bath the water will get
cold". He was also saying that the soap and towels will be given in the
bath.” Hearing such promises some of the guards might have assumed that the
soap was indeed given out to the people as a camouflage measure, although it
was not necessarily so. Cf. protokol doprosa, Tanhum Grinberg, 21.9.1944. GARF
7445-2-134, p. 68.

[142] See the section on Direct and Indirect Witnesses in this chapter.

[143] Mattogno, Bełżec, p. 10. Nearly all quotes of Pechersky’s description of the “black
substance” introduced into the Sobibor gas chambers by revisionists are not
analyzed or commented upon; instead, it is left for the readers to determine
the author’s apparent point. For instance see Paul Grubach, ‘Revisionist
Reflections on the Upcoming “Holocaust” Demjanjuk Trial in Germany,’ CODOH, http://www.codoh.com/viewpoints/vppgdemjanjuk.html,
and Mattogno, ‘The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews: Part II.’

[147] The November 1942 report has been discussed in the section Wartime
Reports in Chapter 1. Kozak’s statement on the bath house barrack is more
likely related to the camp workers, including Jews. Nowhere in his testimony
does he mention Jews being bathed before being sent to the gas chambers, in
contrast to Pressac’s interpretation. Mattogno also ignores this idea of
Pressac’s, likely finding it incorrect.

[152] Pressac believed that the Reinhard camps were originally
established as delousing facilities for the deportation of European Jews into
the occupied Soviet territories, and operated as such until mid-1942. We
strongly disagree with Pressac’s idea.

[153] Mattogno, Bełżec, p.46 n.109. In his article “The Alleged
Experimental Gassing at Belzec,” Kues himself recognizes that Mattogno’s
conclusion comes “however without providing any further documentation backing
up this claim.”

[154] Kues, ‘The Alleged Experimental Gassing at Belzec.’ Kues quotes
Mattogno’s work on “a more sophisticated hot air disinfestation facility at
Majdanek.” Kues ignores Mattogno’s own statement (in the line immediately
following Kues’ quote) that the proposal “never became reality; M&G. Majdanek,
p.130.

[155] MGK ignore the basic point of circulation regarding the working of
hot air disinfectors in their references to Kozak. Without mechanical circulation,
presumably into other rooms, interpreting Kozak’s descriptions as hot air
disinfectors is extremely problematic.